Like to Take Your Pain Away
by ResolutionFromDespair
Summary: Five times Dean stitched up Sam, and one time he couldn't. Written for the prompt "Lacerations/knife wounds."


**A/n: **Title is taken from the song _That's the Way Love Goes_ by Lindsey Buckingham.

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><p>Dad is inside doing research on something that has to do with weather patterns and other stuff that he won't tell Dean about. Dean tried to ask, but Dad just shook his head and told him that he wouldn't understand, and that he wanted some quiet, so couldn't Dean just take Sammy out to play in the parking lot for now?<p>

Except it really wasn't a question, even though Dad made it sound like one. Dean had to scoop up his four-year-old brother and his tiny collection of toy trucks and bring him outside to the grassy strip that runs next to a torn-up fence. Beyond the fence is a Burger King, and the smell of French fries makes Dean's stomach rumble as he watches Sam push his tractor trailer along in the dirt. It's past time for supper—the sky is already the bright orange of the early pumpkins that they've begun to see out at farm stands—and he hopes that Dad hasn't forgotten again.

He sits down and scrapes his feet against the pavement of the parking lot. He's angry at Dad right now, and that puts him in a bad mood, bad enough that he just snapped at Sammy to play by himself when they first got out here, ignoring the look of disappointment that welled up on his face (he's forgotten about it by now anyway, judging by the smile on his grubby little face as he crawls through the grass, which probably hasn't been mowed this decade).

But really, it isn't _fair_. Dean knows about the bad things out there, and he knows about shooting guns and salting doorways, and other things that protect him and his brother. Why, then, won't Dad tell him what he's doing? Why doesn't he _trust_Dean—

Suddenly, Sammy lets out a loud bawl, and all of Dean's anger at his father is forgotten. He runs over to where Sam is sitting a yard or two away, feeling a sickening wave of fear rush over him. He can see blood, and it looks like it's coming from Sam's hand.

"Sammy? Sammy, what'd you do? Let me see." He lays a hand on the back of Sam's hand-me-down shirt, and tries to be brave. He can't let the way that his brother is crying right now get to him. If there's a problem, you need to fix it; that's what Dad tells him.

"My hand." Sam sniffles. "It _hurts_."

"I bet it does." He takes Sam's small hand and carefully turns it over.

There's a cut on his palm that's about an inch long, stopping right before it gets to his wrist. Dean feels bad about the relief that washes over him at the sight of it because it's obvious that Sammy is hurting, but it just doesn't _look_too bad. And for that, he's grateful; he might panic if it looked bad.

"You're gonna be okay," he says to Sam. Remembering what Dad said about injuries that are bleeding, he wraps his hand in his shirt and applies pressure to it. "I can make it stop bleeding, and we'll get a Band-Aid, all right?"

He notices then the shards of brown glass that are hiding in the grass. He recognizes it because Dad drinks from those sort of beer bottles too. But his dad doesn't ever throw them where someone could get hurt. His dad is better than that.

Sam sniffles again, and his eyes are made big by the tears in them, but he's not crying freely anymore. "But it _hurts_."

"I'll make it stop hurting, then," Dean promises, and he scoops up Sam before he can argue anymore, and then promises to come back for his toy trucks after his hand is all right.

Inside, Dad takes one look at the blood and turns pale. He takes Sam from Dean's arms and rinses out his hand out in the bathroom sink, telling Sam that things'll be fine. A breath later he tells Dean that he did good, applying pressure, but it's kind of deep, and they're going to have to stitch it up.

Dad promises Sam that this will make him better, and so Sam quiets down, knowing that Dad would never lie. Still, when Dean pushes in the first stitch with his father's larger hands guiding him, he makes a high keen of pain.

"You're okay, Sammy," Dean says desperately, hoping that his hands don't shake. He's never done this on a person besides Dad, and even that was only once. And Dad never cried out. "I said I'd make it stop hurting, right? Well, if I can do this, it'll stop."

Sam bites his lower lip. "Promise?"

"Promise," he says seriously, and since it only needs five stitches, it isn't long before he's finished. There are still some tears on Sam's cheeks, but he tells Dean that he's feeling better already with that earnest look on his face that only little kids ever have, so maybe it's true.

Later, Dad glances out at the sky, swears, and heads out to grab something from the Burger King across the street. As soon as he's gone, Dean makes sure that Sam is resting and sneaks across the parking lot to grab his forgotten trucks. It takes him awhile to gather them all, even with the lights from the street, but he's found the last one just as Dad is getting back with a grease-stained bag in tow.

The half-hearted reprimand he gets for leaving Sam alone is worth it when Sam hugs him gingerly with both hands, and says that he knew Dean wouldn't break his promises. And Dean resolves then, with one hand in his brother's too-long hair, to never, ever break it, no matter what happens.

**II:**

Sam drags the knife across the whetstone, not really thinking about what he's doing. It's mindless work, not like memorizing Latin or looking through the library, so Sam doesn't like it very much. Normally Dean would take over the job, but he came _this _close to failing most of his classes last term, and Dad got really mad at him.

Right now, Dean is sprawled on his bed and biting his lip as he stares down at the notebook in front of him. He's actually doing his homework for once. Sam knows it's just because Dad says that fourteen is too young to drop out of school and he has to at least pass or else people will start asking too many questions, but it's kinda nice anyway, seeing Dean actually pay attention to something besides what Dad's doing.

_Hunting,_ Sam reminds himself as he sharpens the blade. These knives will be used to kill bad things, monsters from the horror books that he used to read, like werewolves or ghosts. Or maybe even evil dolls, like that one episode that Dean loves from _The Twilight Zone_.

He's so lost in the image of Dad finding a way to destroy Talking Tina that he doesn't even notice that his hand has slipped until he feels sharp, sudden pain blossom over his right index finger.

"Goddamn!" he blurts, hating himself for imitating Dad, but it gets Dean up like a shot, and over to the table in exactly two strides.

"Sammy? Oh, _shit_. C'mon," Dean says, all in one breath. He holds Sam's hand like it's about to fall off and wraps his other arm around Sam's shoulder, guiding him to the tiny bathroom. He turns the faucet until a gentle stream of vaguely-rusty water is flowing out, and then places Sam's hurt finger under it. He hasn't taken his arm away from Sam's shoulder.

The water numbs Sam's finger, but seeing the red swirl down the drain cancels that out by making him feel sicker than he did when he first felt the sting of the cut.

"I told Dad that you shouldn't be doing that," Dean mutters, more to himself than Sam. "You're too young. Should be my job. I'm sorry, Sammy," he adds, and the sudden way that he says it makes it clear that it was what he was thinking all along, not an afterthought. "I don't think it needs stitches, at least. After the bleeding stops, we can probably just put on a Band-aid."

Dean takes his arms away from Sam, shuts off the water and steps just outside the bathroom, reaching for the duffel bag that's lying nearby. Sam peeks out after him, cradling his hand himself now. "It's not your fault. I wasn't thinking."

"You shouldn't have had to be thinking in the first place. Not if I didn't have to do my fu—stupid homework." He scowls as he picks up the first aid kit. "Let's get some pressure on that, 'kay? And I won't tell Dad that you swore, if you promise not to tell him that we're gonna go get something good to eat after this. Deal?"

"Deal," Sam replies, and Dad never does find out about the time that he and Dean left the motel room with its pile of lousy canned foods to go to a warm, cozy diner with torn seats and greasy food. Even after the scar eventually fades, he still remembers how Dean poured too much salt on his fries, and how they blew bubbles in their milkshakes, and how, for a little while, everything was normal and all right.

**III:**

"Let me see it," Dean snaps.

Sam opens his eyes to see his eighteen-year-old brother looming above him and glaring down stormily. "See _what_?"

"Don't play cute with me," Dean growls, pulling the thin linen sheet off of him. "Back of your shirt was all bloody. Not somewhere that you can fix yourself."

"I'm fine," he mutters, hoping that Dad doesn't wake up from where he's passed out on the bed next to Sam's.

"No, you're not." Dean grabs Sam by his collar and manhandles him into the bathroom before Sam can even think to protest. Sometimes he _hates _being short.

Dean pulls the door shut behind them and flicks on the flickering light. "Shirt off. Now."

Sam considers making some sort of snarky remark to that, but the expression on Dean's face says that he won't take any of that right now. And it really _does _hurt.

So he just obeys, shrugging his light sleep shirt off. He winces when it touches the scratch on his back, where the harpy's talons grazed him. "They're not poisonous or anything," he says, mostly so that Dean's sharp inhalation will be dulled by his words. "Their talons are like an eagles's, only bigger. Nothing really bad."

"Do you really want to know where those talons have been?" Dean asks. He carefully yanks off the butterfly bandages that Sam had clumsily applied. "Jesus, you'd probably have a cleaner wound if you dunked a knife in a toilet and shoved it through your back."

"I put the antiseptic on it."

"More like you poured it on and hoped some of it would make it in." Sam feels the familiar sting as Dean presses a cloth soaked in rubbing alcohol against his back. "Why the hell didn't you just tell me or Dad? I mean, I know it's dignified and shit to suffer in silence, but we're almost out of butterfly bandages, and Dad's just going to be pissed if he finds out you were wasting them. _I'm_pretty pissed myself," he adds, because apparently the whole dragging-Sam-out-of-bed thing wasn't clear enough.

"Maybe because _I_wasn't the one that got picked up, flown, and dropped by a crazy bird-lady?" He remembers the terror that he felt clearly, even though it happened at least three hours ago.

"_That's_ what this is about?" Dean sighs. "I'm _fine_, Sam."

"Dad had to pop your arm back in, and you must have more bruises than skin by now!"

"That doesn't matter," he says, pressing down hard against the scratches. "Dude, I feel naked if I don't have a bruise somewhere, that's how used to it I am. And it's not the first time I've dislocated my shoulder. Seriously, you get an excuse for not telling someone if I'd dying, but otherwise, you better let me know when you're hurt."

Sam rolls his eyes, but he lets Dean finish tending to his scratches in peace, and he has to admit that his brother does a much better job than he did.

**IV:**

"Stop being such a bitch and let me see what's wrong," Dean orders tersely.

Sam glares at him and continues to one-handedly bandage his shoulder, knowing that he's being childish, but things kind of suck right now. The hunt went bad, and it went bad quick. Turns out that a bakeneko isn't a ghost-cat in the sense that it's transparent and it hisses a lot. Which he knew, of course, but they didn't expect it to be _that _bad. Getting mauled by a five-foot cat walking on its hind legs hadn't been in the playbook.

That, and things were shitty with Dad right now. He had just taken out the Impala, gone to stew in his own juices, since he hadn't nearly gotten his arm ripped off by a housecat on steroids.

"I'm _fine_."

"You're a _dick_. And if you think I'm gonna let you do that with just your left hand, then you're a stupid dick too."

"Jesus, Dean, I'm not _five_—"

His brother glares, and then Sam finds himself pinned down in the small space between the toilet that he was sitting on a moment ago and the motel's bathroom. His clawed-up arm is pressing against a wall that's probably got as-of-yet undiscovered bacteria living on it, and it's hurting like hell, but at the moment he's a bit more focused on Dean's glaring face.

"Half of me wants to just tell you to not come crying to me when you end up having to hack off your shoulder to get rid of the raging infection," he growls, hands hot on the skin of Sam's chest and good arm, "but the rest of me knows that it'd be on me if something really did happen. And I don't care if you're smarter than all the other senior shitheads, or if you think you're too good for this family. You need stitches, and you can't do them right one-handed, okay? So I'm going to fucking do it, and you're going to fucking let me. And if you don't speak to me for the rest of the week or whatever, I don't care. Got it?"

Sam thinks about just not answering, but that seems petty even to him, so he just grudgingly mutters, "Yes."

"Good." Dean grabs floss and a needle and works in silence. Sam moodily sits through it, not saying anything else, but if he had known that this would be the last time that Dean would do this before going off to Stanford, he'd probably have summoned up something more than a terse "Thanks" after the last of the injuries were stitched up.

**V:**

"Can't believe that you actually need _stitches_," Dean grumbles, sitting behind Sam, who's on his motel bed, leaning forward. There's a long, fairly deep cut near his left shoulder blade, courtesy of the night's hunt. "I was gonna spend the night drinking and getting laid."

"You were going to spend the night driving," Sam retorts. "Y'know, the police don't usually like it when we desecrate century-old tombs."

"They don't know it's us. And anyway, I still could've gone out, had a good time for a few hours. If I were drunk, I'd probably be stupid enough to actually hand you the keys." He gives a derisive snort, just in case it isn't clear how he feels about Sam controlling the Impala.

Sam takes another sip of the bottle of Jack—not his preferred liquor, but this was for taking the edge off of the pain, not for his pleasure. "I'm sorry. Next time a ghost decides to slam me into the one sharp corner in the room, I'll ask it to wait until you've gotten wasted."

"It takes talent to get hurt like you do. Everything should've been all…crumbled. But it just happens to slam you into the sharp casket, or whatever the hell that was."

"What can I say. We all have our skills."

It occurs then to Sam how damningly _normal_ this feels, bantering while Dean fixes him up. It's only been five months since he left Stanford, since he left what he always envisioned _normal_ as, but it's this that really feels right. He hates that that's how it is, but he doesn't hate the feel of family, of Dean being there for them, like he always has.

He almost says as much to Dean, tells him how much it means that he's always been there for him, but at the last moment he reminds himself that he hasn't lost enough blood or drunk enough Jack to possibly justify doing something as chick-flick as that, so he just sticks to the cynical comments and lets Dean do his work.

**I:**

"_Sam_," Dean whispers desperately, cradling his brother. He can feel blood pooling under his hand, and god, Sam's not moving, and his eyes are closed and—

And all Dean can think is that he's going to fix this. Hasn't he always? Didn't he promise that he would?

He's going to make Sam better, like he always does. He has to, and it doesn't matter what the cost is. For Sammy, no price it too high.


End file.
